Even by the lofty doublespeak standards of a Test match press conference, this was an impressive effort from Mickey Arthur after Pakistan were bowled out for 123 by West Indies’ Devendra Bishoo.

“I am not going to take anything away from the way Bishoo bowled because he bowled really, really well. I thought we gave him eight soft wickets.”

One can only presume that Bishoo was incredibly unlucky with pretty much all his non-wicket-taking deliveries but then dismissed batsmen with each of his eight poor deliveries thanks to terrible shots.

21 Appeals

Watching this game has been first of all one of the most boring things you could ever do much akin to self torture, and then suddenly yesterday one of the most interesting days of cricket i’ve watched. I love it when the ball is turning! (And the romantic in me loves it when the West Indies threaten that they might actually do well).

Quite a disconnected comment that.

Would you like a match report from a non cricketer friend about being one of 27 people in the ground on Friday?

Talking of match reports, I watched a day of first class cricket in India last year, with my 2 kids. we took some selfies and promptly left after consuming 2 rounds of ice-creams. I did follow that match later on TV live. would you like a match report of that?

My Dad faced two balls of Bangladeshi bowling in Sicily last week after accidentally walking into the middle of a match and asking if he could “have a go”. The first ball was outside off-stump so he left it well alone, but he managed to get the second one off the metaphorical square.

He tried to follow it up with some light conversation about Jos Buttler (it was the day after Buttler had “misplaced his rag” ), but they couldn’t find a common language which contained the word ‘argument’ or a satisfactory synonym.

Not being one of the sportier kids, I was surprised even to be allowed to bat, let alone open and managed an eyes-closed, flailed 6 off at least twice as many balls (a decent lick in those days), playing enthusiastically at and missing most of them, before being wrongly adjudicated caught behind. To this day I remain adamant I ‘never hit it’.

Bowling proved an even more lucrative exercise with two overs of trundled, round-arm half-trackers yielding a pair of wickets for just the solitary run, one victim adjudged plumb in front by the PTSD-suffering Mr Palmer and the other a catch somewhere around mid-wicket from a top-edged mow. Both batsmen complete ‘duffers’ but they all count.

A promising start but alas that was it, apart from a brief net session for Pollok CC a decade or so later wherein an attempted off-break ended up on the roof of the net, to universal derision. You just know when it’s time to go.

What the comments section lacks in readership, it makes up for in immediacy.

(Is immediacy a made-up American word like ‘normalcy’? Should it really be “immediateness”?)

Plus there’s no pressure in the comments section to write up the match report from the point of view of every inanimate object in the vicinity like some sort of cricketing Kurosawa film (no offense is intended to Ged, by the way, but he sets a high bar in terms of effort).

I assure you, APW, the effort is far more with the reader than with the writer in the matter of those anthropomorphic artifact’s match reports. I believe that KC is sitting on but one more of those, before that literary device is retiring from all forms of KC match reporting.

You have to consider all the email subscribers who never see the comments. Should they miss out just because they’re too lazy to click through? (We can say what we like about them here, they’ll never know.)

BTW, APW, I now realise that your Kurosawa/Rashomon reference relates to multiple angles on the same story, a device I have used once and once only.

I should perhaps also add that, if all goes according to plan, Ivan Meagreheart The Smartphone will be retiring from all forms of communication tomorrow. He’s ready to hang up his sim card; he’s had his (silicon) chips.